There is a funny cultural mentality, a fixed idea that can even be considered something of an ancestral truth; something so deeply lodged into our skulls that we all accept it as being wholly and utterly irrefutable: everybody hates their job.
There has always been an endless production of film and literature devoted to one of life’s most depressing realities; from the gloomy faced employees of The Office, to the restless brutes of Fight Club, we are all expected to catch the same, unrelenting sentiment that labour is dull, miserable and most importantly, fiercely anti-life. American actor and comedian Drew Carey famously joked, “Oh you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at a bar.” Work is meant to be loathed, dreaded and cursed, and anybody who has ever argued otherwise was either a loon or a communist. So now that many of us are cheerfully skipping away from our final exams, only to land ourselves into the murky pits of those part-time jobs we so desperately need for next year’s batch of cling-wrapped textbooks (yes, chances are your precious funds will end up at the campus bookstore and not the student flight centre, you adorable, deluded soul), should we just take a deep breath, mutter “game face!” and get through each day gritting our teeth and watching every perverse, ticking second drag painfully around the wall clock? Will we survive another season of hurried gift-box wrapping, disgruntled last-minute shoppers and mercilessly repeated Christmas carols, drilling into our heads and popping up in our late-night dreams like shrill, demonic choruses?
At the risk of echoing tiresome communist verses, the consumer-driven, capital-obsessed culture we live in today would propel us to answer, yes, absolutely yes. Labour, very simply, equals wages, and there is just no other reason for it. This could be explained in the psychological underlying of our political climate. The influential Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede distinguished between the collectivist culture and the individualist culture. While the former sees people acting largely as a member of a long-term group, emphasising interdependency and placing group goals over individual pursuits, the latter sees people developing and exhibiting their own individual personalities and pursuing their own desires. Hofstede was one of the few critics who challenged Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the theory of human motivation detailing in stages the main factors that drive us, and which is widely accepted in individualist cultures like our own. Maslow’s hierarchy states that self-actualisation, above our more fundamental needs, is the highest order need, emphasising self-centeredness as the apex of human growth. Hofstede argued that such a theory cannot apply to all humans; in the collectivist culture; the need of community benefit will outweigh the individualist ambition, and social needs would be placed more fundamentally than others. Maslow’s hierarchy reflects our fixation on personal achievement and the self, in turn explaining our hopeless fixation on wealth accumulation, which consequently drains our enthusiasm and acknowledgement for all other motivators for work and labour, rationalising those hard-headed laments of, “everybody hates their job”. While both cultures boast their own benefits (the primary ones of the individualist culture being greater national wealth and the encouragement of individual expression), there might be certain things we could borrow from the other that would make our working lives a whole lot easier.
If only, within the limits of an eight-hour working shift, we made a conscious effort to nudge our need for promoting group benefits up a few places in our personal Need’s Pyramid, it might actually encourage us to, dare I say it, love our jobs. It is always said, not on the basis of rigid scientific studies but rather practical observations and common wisdom that human beings, quite simply, need to be needed. Even if a day’s work will not entail racing across Sydney suburbs with a wailing ambulance siren, the simple act of making another person’s day even slightly better, from finding somebody the right shoe size to going into work a few minutes early to brew a pot of coffee for fellow workers, can make huge adjustments to one’s dreary outlook on work. Kahlil Gibran wrote that work is love made visible, that labour itself is a celebration of life and one’s willingness to sustain and enrich it; “For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger. And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine.”
